High Throughput Isolation of Antigen-Specific Antibodies and Cells

Problem Addressed

This is a device for isolating individual antibodies, proteins or cells from a complex mixture, and it addresses the current technology's inefficiencies.  

Technology

Multiplexed isolation of rare antibodies, proteins or cells from complex mixtures is a process essential for disease diagnosis and drug development.  However, current methods, such as affinity chromatography and flow cytometry, can be time and labor intensive when used for interrogating more than a single protein in a sample, and are not well-suited for detecting rare events due to their relatively low throughput.  Professor Jay Han and colleagues have developed a novel method to isolate rare proteins and cells in complex biological samples by flowing a sample incubated with antibody-coated beads of different sizes in a spiral microfluidic channel.  The device takes advantage of the principles of inertial microfluidics to separate the differently sized beads, each bound to a different protein of interest, with high fidelity and throughput.  This system has a variety of applications, ranging from sample purification in pharmaceutical contexts to point of care disease diagnosis, and can be easily adapted for multiplexing.  

Advantages

• Versatile tool that can be used for research, industrial and clinical purposes
• Multiplexed and high throughput
• Can work with small or large volume sample
• High specificity
• Low cost
• Sample can be easily analyzed with downstream tools